ONE should not speak ill of the dead, but it is hard to resist the suspicion that the murder of the army chief of staff on March 1 and of the president on March 2 in the small west African country of Guinea-Bissau were linked to the drug trade in Africa’s first “narco-state.”
On Sunday, a powerful bomb blew up the military headquarters in Bissau, the capital, killing Gen. Batista Tagme Na Wai, chief of Guinea-Bissau’s military, and severely wounding five other senior officers. Less than 24 hours later, gunfire and rocket explosions were heard near the presidential palace, and shortly afterward it was reported that President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira had also been killed.
The army didn’t even deny responsibility. “President Vieira was killed by the army as he tried to flee his house which was being attacked by a group of soldiers close to Chief of Staff Tagme Na Wai, early this morning,” said spokesman Zamora Induta. “The country will start up now. This man had blocked any momentum in this small country.” But it is unlikely that the quarrel was really about how best to run the country.
The shootout had been coming for some time. Last November, President Vieira narrowly survived a machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade attack on his residence by “renegade” soldiers. The 400-strong militia he then created to protect himself from the army was accused of shooting at Gen. Tagme Na Wai in January, and the army forced Vieira to disband it.
After that, Vieira knew that he was a dead man walking, and the bomb that killed Tagme Na Wai was probably an attempt to get his retaliation in first. But this was not simply another in the long line of coups and counter-coups that has characterized Guinea-Bissau’s history since it got its independence from Portugal in 1974.
Guinea-Bissau’s politics were rough even when the stakes were very small: Control of a poverty-stricken country of one-and-a-half million people whose principal export was cashew nuts. Vieira himself first came to power in a coup in 1980, lost it in a military mutiny in 1999, and subsequently went into exile as the country was ravaged by civil war. Then he regained power in an election in 2005 after the previous president was overthrown by the army.
The stakes have got a lot bigger now, because the country has become the main transit point for Colombian cartels smuggling cocaine into Europe. More than half of Guinea-Bissau’s territory is a maze of offshore islands, and the tiny navy lacks the strength to patrol them. There is not even a prison in the country, nor do the police own a computer.
The money that the Colombians can splash around is irresistible to many in the government and the army, and an internal struggle to monopolize that money was the inevitable result. Mostly the struggle has been invisible, but occasionally it came out into plain sight, as when an aircraft suspected of carrying cocaine was prevented from taking off last July by the judicial police, which are under the president’s control.
For five days army troops prevented the police from boarding the plane. When they finally let them on, there was no cocaine there any more, but sniffer dogs went crazy when they were brought aboard. Justice Minister Carmelita Pires subsequently received a number of death threats. In another incident, in April, two soldiers were arrested in a vehicle carrying 635 kg of cocaine — but they were soon released from detention, and have yet to stand trial.
Maybe President Vieira died because he was waging a gallant campaign against the drug chiefs who are taking over the country, but it is at least as likely that he was just involved in a struggle with the army over the proceeds. In any case, the army has won, and the country’s status as Africa’s premier narco-state is assured.
